In Which I've Learned My Lesson

It started out innocently enough. Charis and I were playing on my bed. She wanted to play "Three Rides." I don't know what this means, exactly, except that one of the rides is called "Steering Wheel." (For a while, I thought she was saying "cereal," and that made even less sense.) So there we were, playing "Steering Wheel," and Judah was playing by himself--impressive, for an 19 month-old child--and being very quiet about it. Still, he popped his head in now and again, so things seemed fine.

Really, they did.

Several minutes later, I was changing Judah when I noticed that his arms were quite sticky. I still didn't think much of it, since we had had waffles for breakfast, so his stickiness was to be expected, sort of. It seemed a bit excessive, but I was not concerned.

But it all became crystal clear when I went into the kitchen to get a snack for the kids, and found this:

You will have to use your imagination to picture the floor, for two reasons: 1) I had not vacuumed, so the floor was quite crumby, and it didn't make much sense for me to sweep up the crumbs and then take a picture of the syrup slick, as if my floor is always spotless and crumb-free, and 2) My kitchen floor is carpeted, so it was an incredibly ugly mess. Really, who carpets a kitchen? I know several people who have carpet in their kitchen, and they must be much neater than I am to want to keep said carpet. I cannot count the times I've accidentally dribbled raw chicken juice or bacon grease across the carpet and flipped out because there was no way to properly clean and sanitize without renting a carpet cleaner when, if the floor had only been a hard surface like it's supposed to be, I could have wiped it up with some soap and water and spritzed a bit of antibacterial spray and called it clean. INSTEAD, my carpet is filthy, irreversibly filthy. And if we weren't going to rip it out in just a short while anyway and replace it with beautiful hardwood floors, I would have pulled it up then and there after the mess this morning, because that, my friends, is called The Straw That Broke The Camel's Back.

But I digress.

It took me forever to clean up the syrup puddle this morning because (in case you did not know this) paper towels don't really absorb syrup, they just sort of push it around. Stupid Bounty.

And after that, I would like to say "The End," except that the moral to the story is that I really had it coming to me. Abe's parents sell real maple syrup, and while I grew up on "Pancake Syrup" a la Log Cabin and thought I'd never like real maple syrup, I have grown quite accustomed to having a free and never ending supply of the real stuff in our house. Except that our supply did run out last week, and the kids had been asking for waffles (Judah can actually say waffle now), so I caved and bought a bottle of the fake stuff. And I'm not totally exaggerating (well, maybe a little) when I tell you that Abe, who grew up not only eating real maple syrup but also tapping the trees to get it, was APPALLED that I would even bring the fake stuff into the house. So I guess this is just karma getting back at me for buying the maple-flavored corn syrup in the first place. Sigh.